Optimisation Strategies

Creating the best and most efficient landing page is a hard task to do. This guide might help you get through with it. This is a guest-post by Toptal’s writer Laszlo Monda.

The focus of this landing page guide will be technical. My goal is to help other developers narrow down their search for the right third-party services and technologies, which they will deploy in their landing page designs. This will, hopefully, help them save time and money, which could otherwise be wasted on fruitless experimentation.

Landing page video production and hosting

Presenting video on the web is easier than ever, and yet, few sites use it. It’s not a technical challenge from a web perspective, but it is an investment of other resources, namely time and money. We created about 12 iterations of our landing page trailer video, gradually refining every little detail. The design process was exhausting but very rewarding. I consider this trailer video to be the crown jewel of our landing page which differentiates us from the pack.

Please bear in mind that high-quality content creation is expensive. If you want the best possible results, you will need to outsource the work to professionals, and obviously, start by making sure you can afford it. Depending on what you need, and what sort of budget you have, you could get away with an in-house video. It depends on your skill set and the type of landing page your plan to design.

We settled on a dynamic 3D animation, demonstrating the basic functionality of our keyboard on our landing page. However, if you need a 2D animation of an app or web service, or if you need camera footage, the process will be somewhat different and maybe less challenging than ours.

Once you have a video made, you must host it somewhere, which leads us to some options.

YouTube needs no introduction, as it is the undisputed market leader and a synonym for video on the web. It’s a reasonable choice that would have worked well for us, but we didn’t find its embedded player to be aesthetically pleasing.

Vimeo was an obvious second choice. It features a super clean, elegant, minimalistic design. It’s known for hosting quality content and for its superior high-definition. It was love at first sight, so we ended up choosing it for our landing page.

Wistia is another popular choice among marketers. It provides advanced features like video heatmaps that show you which parts of your videos have been watched, skipped and rewatched. It would have been a great choice, but it doesn’t support full HD quality, a deal-breaker for us.

It’s worth delving into the APIs of these services to better capture the attention of visitors. For example, using the Vimeo player JavaScript API we made the “I want one” buttons on our site pulse three times in a row right after our trailer ends. Used properly, little tweaks like this can increase the conversion rate.

To make matters even more complex, embedding videos on responsive sites is no easy matter. The video has to scale properly, and the experience must be fluid. It can be done by utilising some not-so-obvious CSS tricks.

Hosting 3D content

In order to give our landing page visitors a more immersive experience, we wanted them to be able to explore our keyboard in 3D. There are a few WebGL-based services created specifically for this purpose.

Sketchfab is the most popular of these services. It’s easy to master, provides a lot of visual settings, and is embeddable into a wide range of popular sites, which is why we chose it. However, depending on your needs, you may want to check out a couple of alternatives.

Verold Studio boasts some advanced features, such as animation and interactivity. I’m sure it’s the right choice for many, but we couldn’t import our CAD model into it.

The most minimalistic and simplistic of all WebGL services is p3d.in, but it didn’t support the high-resolution textures used in our 3D model, which was a deal-breaker. Also, it seems that it’s not possible to rotate the model until the textures are fully loaded, which doesn’t result in a great user experience.

Creating 2D animation

One of the major advantages of our keyboard is that it dramatically reduces hand movement. We wanted to visualise this on our landing page by putting the UHK and a regular keyboard side-by-side and displaying an animation. Implementing this wasn’t as simple as it sounds.

Using an embedded video did not only feel like overkill, but it would have to be rendered first, which is extra work. Animated GIFs weren’t a viable solution either given their huge size and limited palette. Canvas would work, but I found SVG to be even better suited for this purpose because the hand objects can be separately moved without affecting the rest of the graphics.

Sometimes you must make your way through cross-browser issues, JavaScript library bugs and nearly endless technical challenges just to make a seemingly obvious thing work. Never underestimate the number of things that can go wrong!

Real-time analytics

Everybody uses Google Analytics and we are no exception, but it’s not specifically built for real-time operations; there are better candidates for this purpose.

Chartbeat is great at notifying us when the site exceeds certain thresholds, most notably the number of simultaneous users on our site. Every now and then someone links our site in a forum, which generates a sudden traffic spike. Thanks to Chartbeat, we immediately know about such events, and able to join the ongoing conversation early on.

Mixpanel helps us gather and analyse events. Site visits, opening the subscription dialogue, subscription and confirming the subscription, are all events that we log. Mixpanel can build funnels out of these events and visualise conversion rates, making things measurable so that we can act upon the numbers.

Clicky is great at several things and we especially love its site heatmaps feature, which reveals where users click on our site. Based on the results, we can adjust the layout of the site, change its content or redesign it to achieve the desired outcome.

HotJar enables website owners to record the interactions of their users. It saves every mouse and keyboard action, and constructs videos out of them so that one can watch what visitors do on the site. Yes, it’s the most privacy intrusive of all, so much so that it’s almost scary!

I surely couldn’t do justice to these services by singling out one because all of them offer so much. Most such services can visualise real-time visitor activity on a map, on a summary screen, or in visitor list, along with lots of metadata such as the referrer URL, operating system and screen size.

I believe that these are some of the best real-time analytics services out there, but there are others, so if you have some specific requirements, Google search for alternatives.

Book an on-demand Q&A session where we answer all further questions you may have about this write-up.

About the guest blogger:

László is a full-stack developer experienced in a wide range of languages and frameworks. He boasts a system-wide understanding and comfortably moves across the various layers of the stack.

About Total:

Toptal is a marketplace for top developers, engineers, programmers, coders, architects, and consultants. Top companies and start-ups hire freelance developers from Toptal for their most mission-critical projects.

No, I’m not talking about long holidays and presents. I’m talking about that time of the year to take a look back and appreciate. I’m talking about that time of the year when we take a look back and appreciate the days gone past and be thankful that they came to be instrumental in our progress.

In the case of Walter Analytics, we can definitely say that we’ve come a long way from where we started back in January of this year. We’ve undergone many changes and advanced our skills and knowledge; and while it’s true that there still a long way to go for the team, we’re very happy and hopeful that this change will continue in the following year.

In the spirit of taking a backtrack and looking back at our progress, we’ve chosen 10 of our most well-received content and hope that you find it not only entertaining but education as well.

Influencer marketing is highly relevant in today’s marketing standards. Influencers are the first ones who grab a product and do a review and make it viral. They control a considerable size of community and influence an even wider audience as well. Measuring their activity is possible but defining metrics for their influence is another story. In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics. [READ MORE]

Influencer marketing is highly relevant in today’s marketing standards. Influencers are the first ones who grab a product and do a review and make it viral. They control a considerable size of community and influence an even wider audience as well. Measuring their activity is possible but defining metrics for their influence is another story. In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics. [READ MORE]

In the recent years, big data has become a significant focus point for businesses. Gathering massive amounts of data is now routine for most of us. It’s not a question of whether or not it is important to collect information on your customers. The key points that should come to mind are the type of data to collect and analyse, and from there, the process to predict consumer behaviour based on patterns and trends derived from the data. Predictive analytics is on the rise, and now everyone can benefit from it. [READ MORE]

Although Virtual Reality is not exactly a platform for the masses, it is the most innovative approach to delivering content as of today. The platform, still in its early stages and loads of new creative ideas has already challenged the digital analytics. Virtual reality has the potential to redefine how we think about measuring the bread and butter of digital analytics: attention and action. This article helps you to understand the behind-the-scenes on this new trend. [READ MORE]

We have seen so many bad examples and sat through hour-long presentations on KPIs and measurement charts with a great set of data pieces and an endless number of slides. So we decided to show you the best way to present and report your data. This process is applicable to all kind of businesses and business cases with any analytics background and data coming from any measurement system. This simple process will help you get the best out from data. [READ MORE]

There are various A/B Testing tools available if you search around, most of which are paid software. But since not everyone is ready to shell out money just to test them out, we’ll highlight one of the known free tools around which is Google Analytics Content Experiments. [READ MORE]

Consumers prefer mobile over desktop when it comes to shopping or content consumption. Mobile referral traffic is taking over desktop usage. It is not a question of how important mobile is. The question is how to capitalise on mobile usage. Here are the most important trends in mobile advertising. [READ MORE]

Walter Analytics has worked with EmployEase for over two years enhancing Analytics and driving the digital growth of the business. This partnership has been a key driver of revenue growth for EmployEase and outlines our framework for working on Analytics with a client. [READ MORE]

Personalised content and design is about providing the best web experience to different target audiences. At the most basic implementation, personalisation is setting up marketing campaigns for different groups of users, with ads for different audiences linking to different audiences linking to landing pages optimised for that audience. At the more complex integration, it is the use of browser cookie information or other technology implementations to dynamically display optimised content and design for a site as a site loads, to audiences depending on previous behaviour or demographic information. [READ MORE]

We have seen the widespread adoption of A/B testing in large companies, with medium sized companies starting to make the move to incremental data-driven changes through A/B testing as well. For web insights, new features in Google Analytics include Universal Analytics and Enhanced Ecommerce, and more recently Demographic and Interest Segmenting, has meant greatly increased insights into the behavioural difference between different website users. So many changes in a market can be hard to grapple, and many businesses just don’t adapt at all. To ensure you remain competitive you must make a measured move to keep your marketing budget accountable, and new analytics insights now allow you to do just that. [READ MORE]

(5 min. read)

Thank you for being part of our 2016 and we hope that you continue to enjoy our content in the following year.

On behalf of the Walter Analytics team, happy holidays and may you have a good new year!

Google Analytics is often the most available digital analytics tool as it is free and easy-to-setup. Basics are important but how can you improve your Google Analytics knowledge?

If you are from the marketing world, you probably used or at least heard of Google Analytics as it is the most-used analytics platform nowadays. It is widely accessible, and the user experience allows even novice users to start to work on the understanding of their digital properties’ performance. In this article, we get hands on and share another three tips on how to improve your Google Analytics usage. Read our previous three tips here.

Think Mobile

Mobile is the biggest thing, hands down. In some cases, visitors coming from mobile are overtaking visitors coming from a desktop. Therefore, you want to know as much as it is possible on your mobile visitors. Google Analytics offers you mobile app analytics as well but now just focus on classic websites with probably mobile-friendly responsive design.

The classic mobile segmentation report at Audience section – Mobile part that you can get is already full of great information, get familiar with it. With some recent update, you can also check not just the exact mobile devices visitors use to view your site, but also you can look up the pictures of these devices. Not everyone is an expert on mobile, so it is a great help for you to know what that device does, what type of mobile browser works on it as well as the size of the screen. It helps you to optimise your site’s design for mobile further.

With custom reports – which we have discussed in our previous post (LINK) – you can add mobile as a primary source of visits as well. It is magical to see how your most successful content changes regarding desktop and mobile visits so don’t be shy to experiment with it.

Track the Right Way

By default, Google Analytics uses the default naming techniques on everything. So “Email” is email and so on as a referral for example. But you might have specific campaigns that you want track individually. You want to know how users responded to your email campaign for example. There are some certain things you need to be aware in this:

Name your campaigns properly and consistently

You don’t want to have an “Email campaign” and an “E-mail campaign” named campaign view in your dashboard. Use consistent naming and follow a campaign naming sheet with your team if you have multiple campaigns you want to track.

Use UTM / Custom URL

You want to know more about how one campaign performs, use a custom URL to track a particular link in your campaign. You will see the custom URL popping up in your Campaigns view in Google Analytics. That view will represent only that campaign and provides you enormous information on how that campaign affected your site’s performance.

Event tracking consistency

We have talked about how Google Tag Manager can help you to understand how users behave on your site, where they click and how they interact with your site in our last post (LINK!). Keep in mind; you need to name those ‘Events’ properly. You don’t want to have an “Email Signup Button” tracking if you have multiple signup options on your site, name them properly and be consistent.

Go Visual!

Google Analytics provides you excellent charts and tables of course. They are simple, straight forward and easy to generate. But what if you want to visualise something that is only a table in Google Analytics? Or maybe what if you want to make those charts prettier? You have two options.

Use third-party visual tools

There are many tools that you can use with Google Analytics to visualise your data. Google Data Studio is one of them, and it is free to use and works well with Analytics. There are other tools as well, like Segment but if you prefer Google-related products, Google Data Studio is highly recommended.

Export your data

All data in Google Analytics can be exported to simple spreadsheets. But remember, these are raw data sets. But if you are building your own reports from scratch or you need to add your raw data into a much bigger stream, exporting your tables directly from Analytics is a great option.

Bonus!

Add Supermetrics to your Google Docs, it’s free (for now). It fetches data from Google-related (and much more) platforms directly to your Google Docs. Now it also has automatized syncs, so you don’t need to export anything, this tool does it for you in a very delicate way.

Landing pages are often treated like websites but they are not. Their sole goal is to convert visitors. But how do we measure their performance?

Landing pages are as old as the websites on the internet. They were here way before social media became a thing and they will be here after the fall of social and open net. They are straightforward and focused on standalone goals: to capture leads. But to create an effective landing page that converts users, we need more than one metric that measures conversions. This article will help you to clear up the dust.

What is a conversion?

Before creating a landing page, the first rule should be to define the goal of the landing page’s purpose. The goal will define what we mean by conversion. Common goals for a landing page can be capturing emails, hitting downloads, spending X amount of time on site, number of pages visited or even more specific goals. Either way, almost all type of goals can be added into Google Analytics’ goal setup sequence.

The landing page’s goal is your key metric; every other metrics should support the journey to your goal.

Supporting metrics

The key benefit of a landing page over a traditional website is that a landing page can be easily adjusted and tailored to the needs of the visitors. If you spot anything that doesn’t work properly or you have a very particular target group of users who are coming to your site, you can quickly adjust your landing page to support their needs. Your primary metric from now on is conversion rate, the number of users who visited your site and converted into leads. Everything else is secondary.

There are common metrics however which you need to follow to measure your landing page’s performance properly.

Visits should be the primary supporting metric. You need traffic to your website to convert leads. Without traffic, no leads. You need to watch for the overall metric as the number of visits, unique users and sessions but, and this might be more important than the stripped-down visits: what are the sources of visits. You probably do some advertising for your landing page, use unique custom URL-s to track your campaigns’ success. It is possible that the landing page has great search engine hits; you want to know the winning keywords and optimise your site from that conclusion. Sources of traffic will tell you the background of your visitors.

Bounce rate is important. High bounce rate tells you that the users who are coming to your site, leave the site immediately. Leading causes for high bounce rate:

a) The lack of information or misinformation on the site

b) Poor user experience design that is not appealing to your visitors

c) The site is difficult to navigate, slow or anything that is connected to a bad development work

Time on page comes after bounce rate. If your users decided to stay on your site, how long do they spend on it? It is a landing page, so unusually high volumes of time are not beneficial. You need to convert users fast. If something is not clear or simple on your page, users can easily get lost and spend valuable time on your site.

Changing the perspective

Every metric you have must support the main goal: conversion. So, you need to check all your metrics from the goal’s perspective. For example, it is great to know from where you have the most traffic. Is it social media? Search engines? If social, which networks? Check the traffic sources and view them from the goal conversion rates. Maybe it tells you: most of the users from Twitter convert, but none of them from Facebook. You might want to review your Facebook strategy to reach equal numbers in social networks in terms of conversion.

Time on site and visits through the landing page also important. With multi-channel funnels and assisted conversions, you can check what it takes to convert. Some users convert on the first click on your site, and there are others who need more time to convert and more browsing on your site. You can also segment these funnels into networks so you would know, for example, users coming from Facebook are most likely to convert to your goal on the first click or within 1 minute on the site.

Harnessing the adjustability

As we’ve said, the key benefit of a landing page over a traditional website is their adjustability. If you have new insights on how users convert on your landing page, you can quickly change the structure of your page. But sometimes you have multiple ways your users convert. In this scenario, you might just need to create multiple landing pages for the same goal. Every individual user will see a different, tailored, adjusted and converting landing page.

There are many tools to use for tailored or flexible landing pages, and there are more tools to measure their performance. Head to our Academy to learn more about these tools and how to use them to create landing pages that convert users into leads!

The year 2016 is almost up with just 3 months more to go. Over the past couple of years, we’ve experimented around and tried different ways to deliver valuable content to our readers.

We’ve come up with a lot of strategies to ensure that our readers are delivered helpful and informative content. With that said, we’ve rounded up some of our popular topics this year. Let’s take a step back and revisit them:

Video content has been increasingly popular and made even more so by social networking platforms due to its ability to engage the audience. If you’re still not convinced or still second-guessing whether to add videos to your content arsenal, we’ve highlighted the reasons for you to think it through with this article.

If you’re keen on connecting to a continuously evolving and diverse market, mobile is the way to go. Check out the emerging trends in mobile advertising and take advantage of them in your next marketing campaign.